Trauma At Birth May Sow Seeds Of Suicide

August 20, 1987|By WASHINGTON POST

The theory that early life experiences are ''imprinted'' in the brain has been used to explain a number of phenomena. It's the reason an infant goose, goat or turtle has nearly unerring knowledge of who its mother is and how to behave.

Now the notion of imprinting is being applied to humans to explain not how babies live their lives but how, years later, they choose to end them.

Dr. Bertil Jacobson, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, says birth trauma -- such as asphyxia, forceps delivery or obstetrical anesthesia -- may be imprinted on the infant brain and replayed as a suicide or fatal abuse of drugs or alcohol later in life.

Jacobson and his colleagues examined the birth records of 412 young Swedes who had killed themselves or died of drug or alcohol abuse between 1978 and 1984. Most of the victims were male and all were younger than 44. The researchers compared those records with those of 2,910 controls who had been born at the same hospitals in the same years.

The scientists found that suicide victims who died by asphyxia -- hanging, strangulation, drowning or gas intoxication -- were more than four times as likely as controls to have suffered birth asphyxia. Asphyxia is lack of oxygen to the brain, usually caused by a crimp in the umbilical cord.

Similarly, those who chose death by mechanical injury -- hanging, strangulation, jumping from heights or firearms -- were more than twice as likely as controls to have undergone mechanical birth trauma, such as forceps delivery, breech birth or entanglement in the umbilical cord.

Jacobson leans toward imprinting as an explanation. ''The mechanism must be due to . . . an unconscious need to repeat a traumatic experience at birth as an adult.''